Posted
by
Soulskillon Saturday March 29, 2014 @11:05PM
from the who-censors-the-censors dept.

hackingbear writes: "In China, censorship is not just about politics; it's also a vibrant business. Police in Beijing have detained at least ten people, including employees at web giant Baidu and a web censor working at the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau (cached version), over allegations that they deleted defamatory online posts about companies and government enterprises in return for money, the Beijing News reports. The case was first surfaced when Baidu noticed and reported several of its workers' illegal activities. From 2010 to 2012, Gu, an ex-Baidu employee, is believed to have deleted over 2,000 posts on Baidu, 500 on news site Sohu and 20 posts on qianlong.com, with over 2 million yuan ($322,000) reportedly changing hands. While Gu can delete negative Internet posts for topics ranging from environmental issues to product quality problems on behalf of companies, he could not delete posts relating to his government clients. So he paid and asked Liu, a Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau web censor, to issue official orders to the web sites to remove the posts (Google translation of Chinese original). Liu was found to have accepted 770,000 yuan ($124,000) from Gu for deleting posts. He also received 150,000 yuan ($24,000) from other sources."

That's about as much as I understood from that headline. Is the headline talking about China-prosecuted Internet-Policement or how China Prosecuated an Internet Policeman. Or did China Prosecute the Internt, by paying a policeman to do it.

I'm sick of these Lumpen-Intelligentia creative disasters appearing everywhere like buzzfeed headlines on a sidebar. For god's sake, try to write something people can read without needing to do double takes.

That's about as much as I understood from that headline. Is the headline talking about China-prosecuted Internet-Policement or how China Prosecuated an Internet Policeman.

To understand articles about China, you need to understand something about China. China is a single party state. You might think that makes the government more monolithic with a greater unity of purpose. But the opposite is true. In multi-party democracies, each party has their own ideology, and only one at a time is running things. But in China, all these ideologies, from reactionary Maoist to free market wingnuts, compete within the communist party, because that is the only way to influence policy. These different ideological factions control different bureacracies and branches of the government. What is going on, is that these factions are competing for power by trying to suppress criticism of themselves, while allowing people to attack their adversaries.

If you take a little time to learn about Chinese politics, and who the big players are, this infighting can be very entertaining. Many Chinese consider it a spectator sport.

There is nothing Maoist about Democrats. In fact, no mainstream party in an industrial or post-industrial state can be considered Maoist. The term only refers to peasant socialism/communism in pre-industrial societies. Although there is some socialism for "peasants" (if you can call them that) in US (Agro subsidies), the farmer populations seem to consider themselves anti-socialistic and vote Republican. No?

In fact, no mainstream party in an industrial or post-industrial state can be considered Maoist. The term only refers to peasant socialism/communism in pre-industrial societies.

Maoism is basically "there are more peasants than workers, so it should be 'peasants of the world, unite.' Oh and by the way, since I'm a Third World guy and most peasants are in the Third World, I should be the leading Marxist now that Stalin is gone. Screw you, Comrade Khrushchev."

There is no dichotomy between socialism and capitalism. Socialist leaders are just as capitalist as Warren Buffet and Carlos Slim. They simply take a different route to profit. All of them use the state to their advantage. They all need an army to protect their fortunes. "Communism" in China is nothing but state run capitalism. It's like watched closed circuit TV.

Reactionary Maoists? You've got that backwards...Maoists are Progressives. Look into the tenets of Maoism to find out why it's such a popular mode of political thought in Western universities. It's a living philosophy, about as far from reactionary as you can get.

This is what the dictionary says:Reactionary: a person who holds political viewpoints that favor a return to a previous state (the status quo ante) in a society.Progressivism: a broad political philosophy based on the Idea of Progress, which asserts that advances in science, technology, economic development, and social organization can improve the human condition.

In China, the "status quo ante" was Maoism. So those that want to return to it, are clearly reactionaries. Depending on your point of view, I su

Isn't it all really rather odd. China is prosecuting censorship of the variety that is the real intention behind censorship in the west. Censorship for the protection of society in the west is just the masquerade to hide paid censorship controlled by PR=B$ agencies and you can bet it will never ever be prosecuted in the West. Oh sure they'll get caught, as they already have been but everyone will tut tut and pretend like it never happened and try to do it again and again and again, often only to bring focu

Only three posts in and we're already doing the moral equivalence song and dance.

Yeah, the "tu quoque" fallacy is big around here.

It's really funny the way the Microsoft shills on here continually mod down their opponents

What alternate universe do you live in? Criticism of Microsoft on Slashdot is consistently and routinely modded +5.

However the hypocrisy and stupidity is still obvious and if we want to be able to suggest improvements to China perhaps we need to keep our own house in order.

Umm... no. If the US government does something bad, we should criticize it. If the Chinese government does something bad, we should criticize it. If the governments of Liechtenstein or Brunei or Tonga are doing bad things, we should criticize them. The important distinction here is "people being screwed over by their governments" vs. "governments

Corruption in China is a fact of life. It's systemic and pervasive. As much as the government talks about stamping it out, they only inflict pin pricks. They make WAY too much money through corruption and it's widely known/accepted in Chinese society. One need only look at the sheer numbers of government functionaries who send their kids overseas to school and who keep huge sums of ill-gotten money in foreign bank accounts. These are kids who have parents with official salaries are often less than US$15k a year and they're parked in posh apartments (paid for in cash), studying at top 20 universities (paid in cash), driving around in fancy cars, living a lavish lifestyle, etc. There's very little effort made to hide it.

The people who benefit from this system are shitting their pants about potential discontent from those who aren't benefiting from the game. One of Mao's rallying cries was stamping out corruption. Once he got into power (by force), those folks were systematically rooted out, jailed, and often killed. Small wonder more and more of these "government officials" are sneaking money and family out of the country and applying for foreign passports. They know there will be a purge following this binge.